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A minority of users reading your content are humans staring at computers

As I was going through my morning routine today, I was wondering if the gym would be open during the winter session. Busily poking at my tofu scramble with my right hand, I grabbed my phone with my left and asked Siri "Is the CSUMB Gym open today?" Siri couldn't tell me, but she did have suggestions for other gyms in the local area. While our gym doesn't live or die based on people asking Siri if it's open or closed, there are plenty of other services that we as a campus want casual searchers to find. Questions like "What plays are happening tonight?" or even "When is the library open?" are very important to our users, and the World Theatre or Library staff probably think they are important too.

In the past three years since our last web re-design, the landscape of the types of software and hardware being used to access the web has changed dramatically, and Siri is a good example of that shift. Over 60% of all traffic on the internet this last year were services like Google or Siri trying to process the web, and we are working on tools in the new campus website to help users build complicated things like opening hours or contact information in a way that these services can parse correctly.

Mobile adoption in the market and on campus has skyrocketed. Just take a look at the kinds of devices found on our wireless network at a normal day in the semester:

Mobile devices are 64% of wireless devices on campus
So between 60% of traffic being bots, and 60% of that on campus being mobile, that makes only 24% of our potential users people using computers. The traditional computer, however, is shifting too. Newer computer users almost never have Microsoft Office installed, and the Chromebook (a stripped-down computer with just a web browser) has recently surpassed Apple in laptop sales. If your website is an assemblage of PDF and Word documents, the number of users who can access them is shrinking.

The web team on campus is thinking about all these challenges as we approach the content-creation process for our users, and we'll have early access to play with these tools as soon as we can get them ready. All these sea changes in users and technology means, however, that our content will need to adapt as well. Completing a content audit is the first step to moving your content, but we're excited about what else you'll be able to create in the months to come.

Switching the body text to a sans serif font increases legibility, which is a measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another. Characters in a sans serif typeface don’t have the tails that serif typeface characters have, which adds space between characters making them easier to read.

Changing the header font to a wider sans serif typeface improves legibility because header characters are no longer compressed, which makes characters difficult to read. We also adjusted the font size of all headers to improve readability, which refers to how easy it is to read words, phrases, blocks of copy such as a book. With…

On Monday, May 22, 2017, Web Services will improve its editor used to create content in csumb.edu.

This will be the first significant improvement to the editor since we launched the last redesign in February 2015.

In addition, we will provide some significant updates to how we create and display key elements, including:Improving how events get made, shared across campus, and displayed on the page.Enabling the ability to "clip" content from one CSUMB site and used on another.Improving how news is displayed on a page.Introducing several new content blocks that will provide more functionality.
Test the new editor
You can test the new editor on a separate site with duplicated content. Our internal user experience team is testing as well and we encourage you to play with it until it breaks. Then tell us about it at webservices@csumb.edu

We will also hold presentations at upcoming Technology Open Labs starting May 5 and running through May 19. Each lab will hold a presentation at …

Coming on Monday, May 22, when we go live with the new editor , you will see a new editing block called “clipping.”

You will be able to clip individual blocks on a page and insert them into your own page. This allows you to publish content that belongs to someone else, and when they update it, the content updates on your page as well.

Screenshots
To start clipping start by adding the clipping block to the page where you want the content of another page.

After adding the clipping block, begin clipping by clicking the begin clipping button.

After clicking "Begin clipping" you will now be in clipping mode. You can navigate to the page with the content you want to clip by using the site's navigation or if you already know the URL you can enter the full URL.

When you are on the page you clip by clicking the "clip part of this page" button to be able to select the blocks you want to clip from the page.